by Tim Curran
“I’m thinking about that salt,” Hubb said. “Well, you can’t just go around throwing suckcocking salt at them pissers. Not practical.”
“How about rocksalt?” Hardy said. “Load it in shotgun shells instead of the pellets. How’s about that?”
And for the first time in a long time, Hubb Sadler grinned.
10
Sometime after Harry Teal, Jacky Kripp, and Roland Smythe escaped from Slayhoke Penitentiary, the National Guard rolled in. Rolled in, scoped it out, and retreated, setting up a half-ass perimeter and immediately calling for reinforcements. What they saw there was beyond anything they could hope to deal with. The men were about coming out of their skins. There were things happening behind that high razor-wire that just could not be.
So the Guard called for back-up.
What they got was not a ragtag collection of State police and county boys, but a first class fighting unit that knew exactly what they were getting into. What they got was the 4^th battalion, 1^st Air Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas. A legendary group of ballbusters and lifetakers that had been shitting on the enemies of the United States since the hot and heady days of the Vietnam War. The 4/1 was commanded by Colonel Raymond Hargesy Pearle, a scarred-up intolerant vet who’d cut his teeth in Vietnam’s Central Highlands with the 4^th Infantry and had been involved in just about every conflict since. If there was a war and there was a body count, you were sure to find Pearle nearby, circling like a buzzard, just grinning his kill-happy smile at the stink of death, which through the years had become to him what Brut or Old Spice were to other men: a personal fragrance.
The 4/1 was originally given the task of securing Fort Providence Military Reservation, which, as Pearle told his adjutant, Lieutenant Waterman, had become “one ugly stripe of hell.” They were to go in and kick ass and take names, surround and secure the installation so that another unit out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina?a nameless entity whose troopers wore no insignia and dressed in black fatigues?might go in unimpeded and set about “pacifying” things. In other words, they were cleaners and the base was to be scrubbed top to bottom so that the particularly ugly stain that had soiled the base would not smudge the Army in general…and particularly those that authorized what was going on there in the first place.
But, given the situation at Slayhoke and the possibility of what was going on there spreading too far and gathering the interest of the media at large, the 4/1 was diverted to Slayhoke.
“Well, ain’t it just the way in this man’s Army?” Pearle told Waterman as they helicoptered to the location in the driving rain. “You get a crack team of nutcrackers like my boys and the powers that be waste ‘em puddle-jumping from one shitsplat to the next here in God’s country. A prison riot of all things.”
“Not just a prison riot, Sir,” Waterman reminded him. “I think most of the convicts and guards are dead. At least they were. Now we have those goddamn zombies all over the place.”
Pearle looked over at him and looked over at him hard. “Oops-de-doo, Bob. I think you just said a naughty word that is not to be spoken over unsecure channels.”
“Sorry, Sir.”
Pearle kept staring at him, something beneath his skin that was savage and bloodthirsty very badly wanted to burst free and maul Waterman. But that was Pearle. A tall, thin, wiry man that exuded something from his pores, maybe, that was just downright disturbing. You knew instinctively not to cross him. He did not shout and he did not swear. There was an icy coolness to him that could make your skin crawl when he put those eyes on you that were just flat and dead and gray as slate. Looking into them was like peering into a tomb. You saw death in them and not just death, but an unpleasant appreciation of death, a secret joy over that state of being that he had offered up so freely and plentifully in his career.
There were not many men who could meet those eyes for more than a moment or two and Waterman was surely not among them. So he looked away as something cold slinked in his bowels.
Pearle smiled. “Look at me, Bob.”
“Sir, I?”
“Look at me,” he said. “I am ordering you to meet my gaze and I’m giving you exactly two seconds to comply.”
Waterman did, those eyes boring right through him. Slash-and-burn eyes that would leave nothing left standing in your soul if you looked into them long enough.
“I wasn’t thinking, Sir,” Waterman managed. “I’m sorry, Sir.”
Pearle kept smiling. “Sorry don’t cut it, my friend. Don’t cut it at all. What we have at this prison is a riot instigated by unfriendlies and I’ll ask you to keep that in mind. I do not wish to hear that other word. You may refer to these individuals as “Walkers” if you so desire, but if I ever, ever, ever hear you use that other naughty curse word in front of me or my men, I will surely draw my K-Bar from its sheath and free you of your much-beloved but seldom-used jewlies. Are we on the same page here?”
“Yes, Sir,” Waterman said, deflating inside in a rush of tepid wind.
“Excellent,” Pearle said, looking away. “Excellent.”
When they hit the ground and the men and equipment of the 4/1 had been deployed and they had linked up with the National Guard unit that was essentially shaking and pissing its own boots on that makeshift perimeter, Pearle took charge. Took charge of his men and those of Captain Sheebly, the Guard commander.
“Here’s what I want,” he said. “First off, reinforce this perimeter. Frankly, it’s sad. It’s pathetic. I’ve seen two-year old girls fresh off the nipple build a better fortification with wet beach sand. Hop to it. Your men are bunched together, Sheebly, and that is surely a sad state of affairs. You have gaping holes in your perimeter. I want them plugged. I want the fifty cals and the sixties in place. I want fire teams ready to respond. I want flamethrowers every seventh man. I want that outer perimeter mined. Tell your boys to set their Claymores and be ready. Last and surely not least, bring in those earthmovers. I want a four-foot by four-foot trench dug right around the prison wall. And when that’s done, you bring in that tanker and you flood that trench with hi-test. You got me on this? Good. Now I want all this yesterday. Hop to it.”
Nobody needed to be told twice.
While Pearle stood there waving his K-Bar fighting knife around like a conductor directing a symphony of death, men scurried every which way like the industrious little ants they were. When Colonel Raymond Hargesy Pearle took charge, things happened. And if you could not accept that and become part of the solution, then you were definitely part of the problem.
And you sure as hell did not want that.
11
Before the 4/1 was deployed, they were briefed.
Briefed as to what to expect at Fort Providence.
And it was like no briefing anyone had seen before. What the officers and NCOs of the 4/1 were shown and told was about as classified as classified got. So top secret that not only would said files go right into the classified burn-bag at the close of the briefing, but so would anyone else that looked like they might want to spread the news. Pearle sat there drumming a pencil against his knuckles. He was a good soldier who did things by the book and definitely knew when to speak up and when to zipper his mouth duly shut. So he listened while the intelligence people from S-2 had their say. He did not so much as raise an eyebrow when it was all laid out for him, even though he was thinking that what he was being told was strictly drive-in movie fare.
When the slicks from S-2 were done jabber-jawing, Pearle opened his mouth. “First off, gentlemen, am I hearing you correctly here? Am I to understand that a United States Army medical research facility has been overwhelmed by something that generally provides fodder for bad movies or cuts sugar cane in Haiti? Am I hearing you correctly?”
Simmons, an S-2 major, assured him that he was. “Yes, Colonel. The situation at Fort Providence is of a most extraordinary nature.”
Pearle looked at Waterman, arched an eyebrow. “No, Major, you are most certainly wrong in your assessment of th
e situation. A group of Middle Eastern urine-drinking, camel-riding, Allah-worshipping extremist ragheads that were able to breach the security of this country and fly planes into the Twin Towers was extraordinary. This is inconceivable and downright distressing.”
Simmons licked his lips. They were very chapped as if he spent a lot of time licking them. “It is, Colonel. But the point is that this is a real situation. And we need you to take your men in and secure that base so that another group from Bragg can…sanitize things there.”
“And might I ask who this nameless group of sanitizers might be called? Are we talking Berets here or Delta Force? Or might this be a unit that is truly nameless?”
“Colonel,” Simmons said. “The identity of this group is unimportant. What I will show you now is what concerns us today.”
“By all means proceed,” Pearle told him.
Now that the colonel and his people had received their introductory chat, they viewed a series of videos that were not only extraordinary, but inconceivable and downright distressing. And maybe that didn’t even cut it. As Pearle watched, his men more than a little nervous around him, he decided that had it not been for the very clinical, almost sterile approach to the subject matter, he would have thought what he was seeing was thrown together by Hollywood effects people.
It was that unbelievable.
They were shown video of what appeared to be a woman who was strapped to a table in some sort of containment facility. She was naked and appeared to be psychotic. She was straining at the straps that held her, her yellow teeth snapping, foam that was dirty gray spraying from her mouth. Her flesh was white as ivory, swollen in places with lumps and set with odd punctures from which an obsidian liquid ran like tears. And her eyes were just black holes, shiny and somehow vicious. She was screaming and writhing on that table, almost bonelessly, thrashing her head from side to side. And this was how they saw the massive wound above her left ear. There was a great cavity there, most of the skull blasted away.
She should have been dead; but she was not.
“Zombie,” someone said.
And although this word would later become taboo, at that moment in time nobody disagreed. For yes, this woman was dead…yet she was quite animated.
She fought for a time, then she relaxed.
She looked right at the camera with those black, almost gelid looking eyes, and began to laugh with a wet, gurgling sound. Ink-colored saliva ran from the corners of her lips, accentuating the bloodless pallor of her flaking skin. Then she started to speak, the words guttural and horse and almost indecipherable.
“That’s Arabic,” Waterman said.
“Is she from the Middle East?” someone else said.
“No,” Simmons said, clearing his throat. “This woman was an American soldier from Alabama. She had never been to the Middle East. At the time of her death she had no language proficiency other than that of her native tongue. The wound in her head was caused by a training explosion. It was instantly fatal.”
Waterman just shook his head. “Why is she speaking Arabic? How can she be speaking Arabic?”
“And fluently by the sound of it,” Pearle pointed out. “With a localized accent that you hear amongst Sunni populations in Beirut…if I’m not mistaken.”
“You’re not,” Simmons said. “We don’t know how she’s able to speak the language. But many of the…newly risen, have faculties they did not possess in life.”
The woman kept speaking, laughing now and then. If anything, she reminded Pearle of that little girl in the movie that puked up the green stuff.
Waterman, a West Point graduate who had studied Middle Eastern languages, said, “That’s not Arabic now…it’s…it sounds like a mishmash of Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew. If you slow it down a bit, I might be able to translate some of it…”
But Simmons looked uneasy at that. It was obvious he did not want Waterman translating it. And all there got the feeling that it had already been translated and Simmons didn’t care much for what she was saying. To prove this, he shot through the video to the next snippet.
This stream seemed to be taken outside.
Simmons said it was taken a few days after the explosion at Fort Providence. It showed a team in white protective suits walking down empty lanes in the rain or examining the carcasses of dead animals in the grass. They took samples and drew fluids. The same with the cadavers of men and women. They seemed to be dead. Then the team stood over the corpse of what might have been a man, but so badly damaged and decayed that he had no limbs, just a trunk rolling in the grass, his chest ripped open, ribs on display. The skin of his face was sheared right down to the muscle beneath. But his eyes were shocklingly alive and aware. And the most unpleasant part of that was that he was speaking in a very calm, though flat and dead voice:
“…lays there and waits, that’s how I do it. Lays there and waits until my time comes and then I open my eyes and have my bit of fun. I likes the little boys best, don’t I? Loves to get my hands on them, slits them open and plays with them slimy, coiling things that slip out. Likes to watch ‘em die like that. What good fun that is. Watch ‘em die and pulls on my cock the whole while. Naughty by name and naughty by nature, that’s what old Jim is. You there…Doctor Holmes? You haves a fat little boy at home, don’t you? Sweet bit, I’d get my teethes on him, cut his throat while I lays on top of him. Little David, lovely little David…does he likes them clowns? There’s a funny little clown coming to town, what a silly lark that one is…”
Simmons killed the audio then while that corpse continued to speak. Not agitated or violent, just chatting away as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Everyone was a little shaken by what they saw and more particularly by what they heard.
“Who the hell was that?” Waterman said. “Why was he saying those things? He had a British accent.”
Simmons licked his lips again. “That was the remains of Private Charles Ardansky from Youngstown, Ohio. He was not a British natural. Nor had he ever been out of this country. He died in the explosion…and then, woke up in that state, speaking that way. He was nineteen years old.”
“But that was the voice of a middle-aged British man,” Waterman said, still unable to wrap his brain around any of it. “That was no nineteen-year old boy from Ohio. And Holmes? He was one of the men in those suits? How could Ardansky know about his son?”
Simmon said, “The newly-risen know things they did not know in life. They often speak in voices other than their own.”
“But that’s…that’s like demonic poss?”
“Hold your tongue, Bob,” Pearle warned him. “It’s not our job to figure the hows and whys. So zip it up, by God.”
Even when the video was in good condition, it was sometimes scratchy-looking like an old movie. Next they saw a couple men dressed in desert camouflage fatigues that were very dirty and burned-looking. They were standing in the middle of the road outside a nondescript building in the rain. Simmons said they were both members of an Army Ranger battalion that had been KIA in Afghanistan.
And Pearle didn’t say it, but he was thinking, Sure, killed over in that hellhole serving God and country, so you boys shipped their bodies home and brought them back to life at Providence. He did not know the precise mechanism of resurrection and Simmons was avoiding the subject just as he was avoiding discussing the research program that had brought all this into being. But that was the Army. Simmons probably didn’t even know himself.
The two dead men were in pretty rough shape. The one on the left was very bloated and white and there were clearly maggots nesting in his face. The one on the right was missing his left arm…though when the camera zoomed, Pearle saw that was not the case at all. Something was growing from the stump like a vestigial limb, but thin and rawboned, fingers snaking around at the end of a spadelike hand. Not five of them, but seven.
The team moved in. They carried tanks on their backs connected to hoses in their hands. They sprayed the two dead men down with a yel
lowish mist and the effects were immediate: they melted. There was no other word for it. They began to steam and sizzle and went down. By the time they hit the ground, most of their flesh had slid right off the bones beneath like liquid plastic. They continued to flop about for a time, but soon enough they stopped moving.
“What was that stuff?” Waterman asked. “What was that? Acid?”
“An experimental toxin,” was all Simmons would say.
Waterman opened his mouth to ask more questions, but Pearle gave him a look and he shut up. Pearle figured he was going to have to have a talk with his adjutant. Man had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Wouldn’t bode well for his career in this man’s army. Pearle’s other men weren’t saying a thing. Seemed that you couldn’t make them speak. What they were seeing had permanently sealed their lips.
“Appeared that that trooper had seven fingers,” Pearle said.
“Yes, mutations are another problem,” Simmons said. “As you’ll soon see.”
The video cut away again and now the cameraman was descending down a flight of stone steps in what appeared to be a cellar. Cardboard boxes feathered with mildew, dusty beams, drooping cobwebs. A few members of the white-suited containment team were examining something in the corner…something incredible. It looked like a dog, a swollen hairless dog. Its jaws were wide, teeth barred. The canine anatomy was unmistakable…but it wasn’t a dog. Not anymore. It didn’t seem to have any limbs. Long, glistening white threads grew out of its hide. Some hung slack and others were taut, growing up out of the dog’s hide in nets where they were attached to the walls like spiderwebs.
It was bad. Plenty bad.
But what was worse was that the dog was not dead.
As the team members began poking it with metal probes, it began to move with a flabby motion, those white threads coiling and snapping like tentacles. They thrashed in the air like they were looking for something to grab. The team members gave them a wide berth. The dog’s body was just a fleshy, colorless protoplasmic mass that roiled and squirmed. Its head moved on its neck, jaws opening and closing, a tongue like a hollow tube slapping around. It was making a noise…a low, bestial screeching sound.